[Illustration: Hacienda Manga de Clavo, Veracruz: owned by Santa Anna. Rendering from an 1868 bank bond; hacienda destroyed.] Zapata was assassinated while reconnoitering at the Hacienda Chinameca. He was shot as he entered the patio. Villa was gunned down in his Dodge, on the road near his Hacienda Canutillo, the estate given him as a political bribe. +VII. Mexico Since the Revolution+ [Illustration: Hacienda cattle brand] In the summer of 1938, President Lázaro Cárdenas wrote to his American friend, William C. Townsend: We are confident that the people and the government of the United States will be able to grasp the fact that the breaking up of the large estates is the main point in our national program for improving the living conditions of the peasants of Mexico. The ideal of giving land to the masses was written into the Constitution at the cost of much bloodshed and my government is duty-bound to comply with that mandate. All the holdings that are larger than what the Agrarian Code permits are subject to distribution if there are peasants nearby who do not have land to till. Each landowner, however, is permitted to retain 370 acres, whether he is a foreigner or a Mexican. By 1940, approximately 45 million acres of hacienda land had been turned over to the homeless and the landless by President Cárdenas (1934-1940). Three hundred haciendas in the country could claim more than 1 million acres apiece, and then only for a brief period. [Illustration: Hacienda de Esperanza, D.F.: residence. Cattle stalls on ground floor.] [Illustration: Hacienda de Águilar, Oaxaca: bas relief, 3 feet x 5 feet, front wall of residence.] [Illustration: Hacienda de Sodzil, Yucatán: 19th-century residence.] [Illustration: Hacienda de los Molinos, Tlaxcala: 16th-century chapel. Cholula pyramid in the distance.] [Illustration: Hacienda Quinta Carolina, Chihuahua: main residence.] The revolution had achieved an important goal. Men and women were free to live in a more congenial environment: _Rurales_ (police) would no longer pursue them. The four-century-old illusion of a _patrón_ (master) had vanished; in its place the workers found themselves unshackled. They were hungry but no longer whipped. Mexico began to say goodbye to the culture of poverty. President Cárdenas, traveling from village to village, from hacienda to hacienda, crisscrossing his country throughout his term in office, listened to the little man, and the little man believed what the _presidente_ said, as he promised roads, bridges, schools, clinics, water, and land. Millions of peasants thanked him for a home and independence. [Illustration: Hacienda Mendocina, Puebla: 18th-century guest home on island in small man-made lake.]